Ahead of tomorrow's 112th anniversary of the tragedy, from Canada's National Post, April 14, 2022:
The Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic 110 years ago tonight
It was 110 years ago tonight that RMS Titanic struck an iceberg off
the coast of Newfoundland and foundered in just two hours and 40
minutes. The sinking would condemn more than 1,500 to die in the frigid
North Atlantic, but someone conspicuously not among the dead that night
was the ship’s chief baker Charles Joughin, who survived history’s worst
maritime disaster by getting incredibly soused. To learn more, watch
the Everything Should Be Better
video, read the transcript below, or scroll down further for a more
complete account of Joughin’s incredible tale of booze-soaked survival.
This is Charles Joughin, chief baker aboard the RMS Titanic. When the Titanic struck an iceberg on the night of April 14th, 1912, Joughin’s immediate reaction was to get wicked drunk, literally throw women and children into lifeboats for a while, and then ride the ship’s stern into the ocean.
Fifteen hundred people died of exposure in the North Atlantic that night, but Joughin calmly paddled around for a couple hours until he found an overturned lifeboat to crawl onto. His hair stayed dry and he didn’t even get frostbite.
Joughin had unwittingly done almost everything you’re supposed to do in a shipwreck. He had delayed immersion; by clinging to the stern he was literally the last passenger to go into the water. And here’s where the booze came in: He stayed calm.
Most Titanic victims understandably succumbed to mortal panic as soon as they hit the icy water, but Joughin was so bombed out of his mind that he didn’t seem to care.
Booze didn’t protect Joughin from the cold that night, but it did give him just enough false hope and inflated confidence to think that he could doggy paddle his way out of history’s worst maritime disaster. And in this one case, that turned out to be true.
Below, find a more complete telling of Joughin’s story, first published by the National Post in 2017.
They were supposed to be figuring out how the world’s largest ocean liner had sunk. But instead, one of the members of the British Titanic inquiry was grilling a survivor on how tipsy he’d been at the time of the disaster. “This is very important,” said the questioner, shushing the wigged Wreck Commissioner when asked the purpose of this booze-related interrogation. “I think his getting a drink had a lot to do with saving his life. ”Before the inquiry sat Charles Joughin, the chief baker of the RMS Titanic and one of the most remarkable survival stories of that fateful night.
The baker had nonchalantly stepped off the stern of the sinking liner. Then, as 1,500 screaming, panicked souls drowned and froze to death around him, Joughin calmly paddled around until dawn. After being fished out by a lifeboat, he was back at work within days.
It was an almost physiologically impossible feat of survival. And according to the British Titanic inquiry, it was because the 33-year-old Englishman had the presence of mind to greet history’s greatest maritime disaster by getting smashed. To be sure, a good rule of thumb is that a drunk man will usually freeze to death faster than a sober man.
The warming sensation of a glass of brandy (and the telltale red cheeks that sometimes results) is caused by vasodilation, the phenomenon of warm blood rushing to the surface of the skin. In a survival situation, having all that warm blood away from the vital organs means that the drinker is at greater risk of hypothermia. However, Canadian hypothermia expert Gordon Giesbrecht figures that in the -2 C temperature of the North Atlantic, the water was cold enough to quickly tighten Joughin’s blood vessels and cancel out any effect of the alcohol. “At low to moderate doses of alcohol, cold will win out,” said Giesbrecht, a University of Manitoba professor who has performed hundreds of cold-water immersion studies. What Joughin would have had, however, is the awesome, life-saving power of liquid courage.Alcohol remains a leading cause of humans getting into fatal situations, including freezing to death. Nevertheless, the relaxing qualities of the drug have long been known to give humans an uncanny ability to survive trauma.A recent study looked at 14 years of Illinois hospital data and found that stab and gunshot victims were more likely to survive the more inebriated they were.
“In an ER, cold patients who are really drunk can walk in and they’re conscious at a temperature that they shouldn’t be,” said Giesbrecht.
And indeed, Joughin’s actions that night speak to a man unfazed by impending disaster. Immediately after hearing the collision with an iceberg, the chief baker leapt out of his bunk and began dispatching his staff to stock the lifeboats with bread and biscuits.This done, he popped back into his cabin for a drink before heading topside to help load lifeboats. Not only did Joughin refuse his own place in a boat, but he and a few other men began forcibly chucking reluctant women into empty seats, likely saving their lives. “We threw them in,” he testified later.
The top deck of the increasingly listing Titanic was mostly cleared of lifeboats by 1:30 a.m. To most, this was a panic-inducing sign that all hope of rescue was gone. But to Joughin, it was a cue to head back to his cabin for another drink.“ He sat down on his bunk and nursed it along — aware but not particularly caring that the water now rippled through the cabin doorway,” wrote historian Walter Lord in A Night to Remember. Lord was in touch with Joughin just before the baker’s 1956 death.Joughin then splashed topside again, where he took it upon himself to begin throwing deck chairs overboard, with an eye to filling the water with impromptu floatation devices. Parched, he then worked his way back to his pantry to get a drink of water. The baker was standing on the stern when the ship broke in half. And yet, he remembered the violent, catastrophic breakup only as a “great list over to port.”“There was no great shock, or anything,” he told the inquiry.Deftly moving through swarms of people, Joughin made it to the stern rail of the ship. At exactly 2:20 a.m., he rode the sinking Titanic into the sea like an elevator. As with all surviving Titanic crew members, 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912 was also the exact moment at which the White Star Line stopped paying him....
And more tomorrow.
